Businesses including banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters and supermarkets have been taken offline following a huge global outage.
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Major U.S. airlines have been grounded. The outage appears to be affecting Windows PCs globally.
Users in Australia began reporting issues early this morning, stating they had been locked out of their workstations.
Microsoft says it is taking "mitigation actions" after service issues, it has said. It says its outage started at about 6pm Eastern Time. The company says it is investigating issues with cloud services in the U.S,. and an issue impacting several of its apps and services.
Major large U.S. carriers have issued ground stops due to communication issues.
Trains in the UK have told customers to expect delays amid "widespread IT issues".
German and Spanish airports are also reporting issues. Berlin airport has said it is is experiencing delays to check-ins due to a "technical fault". Over in Spain, an "incident" has been reported at all of the country's airports.
Automated boarding scanners at UK's Edinburgh Airport are offline, a witness from the Reuters news agency says.
The London Stock Exchange is among the businesses that have been affected.
The global outage of the internet has affected the Indian subcontinent as well.
Airlines have suffered disruptions in their operations and a number of flights have been halted.
In a statement on X, SpiceJet said: "We're currently facing a technical issue in providing updates on flight disruptions. Our team is actively working to resolve this issue. We regret for any inconvenience caused and will update you once the issue is resolved. Thank you for your patience and co-operation."
Akasa Air also said: "Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable."
News channels like NDTV and others went off air temporarily. Computers in newsrooms had stalled effecting the news production. ■
The main thing making weather headlines Friday and into the weekend will be the widespread coverage of showers and thunderstorms across much of the central and eastern U.S., with a particular focus across southeast Texas, the Mid-South, and portions of Virginia.